Table of Contents
Who are you?
Who is “I” ? [chatgpt]
Can you translate this Turkish sentence into English and add your comments: “Birey, insan, şahıs, ben, o, falan gibi kelimelerin bireyin hangi özelliğinden bahsettiği açık değildir. Yani insanı –insan bireyini– insan yapan hangi özelliğidir? ”Ben“ diyen birey kimin için konuşmaktadır.”
Translation:
The words such as individual, human, person, I, he/she, and so on do not make it clear which specific feature of the individual they refer to. In other words, what is the characteristic that makes a person—*a human individual*—human? When an individual says “I,” for whom are they speaking?
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Comments:
This passage delves into philosophical and linguistic inquiries about individuality and self-hood. It raises two interconnected questions:
- Ambiguity of Terms: The author points out that commonly used words like “individual” or “I” are vague and fail to pinpoint the defining characteristic of a person. This invites reflection on how language captures—or fails to capture—the essence of being human.
- The “I” Question: The second part asks a deep existential question: When someone refers to themselves as “I,” are they speaking solely for their own self-awareness, or does this “I” have a broader relational or universal significance?
This could be explored through the lens of philosophy (e.g., Descartes’ cogito or Heidegger’s Dasein) or even linguistics (e.g., the role of pronouns in shaping identity). It seems to probe the nature of identity, self-perception, and the relationship between the individual and the collective.
Notes
- This is a huge subject. Some random notes.
- How is “I” defined?
- I’m not “I”.
- Like anything else “I” must be defined to have a meaning.
- We know as an undeniable fact that the human individual is not a homogeneous organism.
- And we cannot say that the body, the flesh, bones, organs etc., visible or invisible constitute the individual. No. The body is not the individual.
- There are cells too. The definition of the individual appears to depend on the unit we choose. For different contexts we may choose different units. Selecting cells as units obviously will be useful in some contexts. Selecting the mind as unit will be useful other contexts.
- But since the individual is a conscious being we may also ask the conscious being with what “it” identifies with.
- Very complex problem.
- There are so many levels and dimensions that make up the “material” body.
- We may also use the analogy of a computer and say that human individual is an organism who is made of two different but complementary entities: Hardware (the body) and software (the genetic code). But there is another software active in the human body and this is spoken and written language that we acquire gradually after we are born. We are not born with this language. And this language is foreign and artificial to the body and to the factory loaded programming or the genetic code.
- So we have algorithms based on the factory code and based on the later code, our language.
- Our consciousness is different that the consciousness of a cat because we perceive the world through language, not directly as a cat. This makes human alienated creatures. Alienated to nature and also to themselves.
- Humans are so confused about how to go through this life that they were very happy to receive a code of conduct from Gods. Unfortunately, the rulers knew this fact and they actually defined or written the rules of conduct then reveled them to poor population as words and orders of gods. Programming through propaganda is an old art.
- Humans created a world based on this learned language not based on the factory language.
- Some also distinguish between the mind and the “gut” or the instinct or the animal part. This means that all our decisions are made in the gut or by other symbiotic organisms. If so why don’t we keep responsible symbiotic organisms for the consequences of their decisions but we keep the body responsible? This is weird.
- Defining characteristics of a person
- The way we call an organism such as the human body depends on our choice of unit.
- “The essence of being”. No. The essence of “I”.
- “The words such as individual, human, person, I, he/she, and so on” Each of these words is defined by a specific unit out of infinite properties of the organism we call human body or the individual.